and feel its total dark sublime
by schweinsty
Summary: How the Winter Soldier went looking for Bucky Barnes, and what (and who) he found there. Shameless h/c.


A.N. Title taken from W.H. Auden's "The More Loving Ones", which always comes to mind when I read a Winter Soldier fic.

**and feel its total dark sublime**

0.1

Captain Rogers lays no longer on the shore, and Washington, D.C. in its entirety is blanketed by flashing lights and sirens. Figures scurry over the rubble of the Triskelion, digging and scrambling and occasionally calling for a "Medic! Stat! We've got a live one!"

The Winter Soldier sits on a rather tall building nearby and watches.

0.3-0.4

One of the faint little figures on the rubbles breaks off by itself and scours the rubble of what, from blueprints, the Winter Soldier knows was once the general area where the R&amp;D department was located.

After scrabbling through man-sized chunks of stone, the figure straightens, climbs down the rubble, and carefully sneaks out past the first few rings of medics and police and people in black suits with laughably outdated earpieces.

The figure walks confidently and flashes some sort of badge, but once away from the immediate vicinity of devastation, the figure, whom the Soldier can now see is a man in shirt with rolled-up cuffs and tailored pants, breaks into a hurried stride that speaks to fear and desperation and a need to be away from all that is behind.

Such things are alien to the Soldier, but he recognizes them in others all the same.

The man stops, finally, at a safe house in a quiet, residential neighborhood where children likely play outside on days the city's not alight with panic.

The man disarms a booby trap before he steps inside, and he is so intent on hiding he does not notice he is not alone.

There's no one else in the house, but even so the Soldier waits until the door is locked and bolted and the man convinced in his safety before he strikes.

0.5

They talk.

0.6

Afterwards, the Soldier sets the house on fire but does not linger while it burns. Emergency services will naturally be delayed today, but that is no reason to be careless.

Scatter for one month and regroup at a predetermined rendezvous, the HYDRA agent said.

(He recognized the Winter Soldier and gave up information without excessive prodding, but the Soldier does not remember his face from before. It is irrelevant).

The agent knew only his rendezvous, but the Soldier knows it will be easy to discover more, and now he has a month to kill before he can start on anything else, if he wants to.

The latter part of which is a very strange and curious thought, but the Soldier does not linger on it, because he's not sure he's ever been out of cryo this long and he doesn't have a mission and he

he doesn't know what to do.

He finds a house with an owner on vacation and tends his wounds, then decides to sleep and leave more thoughts until the morning.

He sleeps for a day and a half.

2

The Winter Soldier had some training, over the years, in retrieving information from a target's computer system. Sporadic tutelage: a lab tech (shaking hands and shortened breath) telling him how to reboot a system sometime in the nineties, a different person explaining USB drives in 2004.

He's not sure if he's any sort of soldier any more, but computers haven't gotten much more complicated since the last time he had to use one (unlike 1988, and he remembered pain when he returned from that), and he steals a laptop outside a cafe and searches for information on James Buchanan Barnes.

There's so much everywhere he can't take it all in, but one place mentions the Smithsonian, and the name of the museum sounds familiar in a vague sort of way, so he takes a motorcycle from a parking spot outside a bookstore and visits.

None of the displays there bring a sudden flood of memories to mind, but some of the names sit funny on his tongue like they've rolled off it before, and one time when he stops to look at a cigarette lighter that used to belong to the man who was him before he was, he knows exactly what the weight of the lighter in his front pants pocket would feel like when he trudged through a swamp (rifle over his head like a precious, precious baby [and Dum Dum was getting spit in his porridge if he made one more crack about snipers]) and his trousers grew soggy and stuck to his thighs.

He stays until the museum closes but receives no further insight, and he leaves only with what might or might not be a memory and a name and rank that do not, at least, feel stranger on his skin than any others would.

4

Barnes wakes up that morning and remembers that he used to like pork chops.

He ate the last of the protein bars in his vest pockets the day before, so he steals a stockbroker's wallet when he goes outside and finds a diner that feels too slick and shiny but smells like something he thinks he might like.

He spends the afternoon in the bathroom of an abandoned office building he broke into. It's hours later still before he can walk ten steps without heaving, but he trudges to a grocery storea and shoplifts some plain white bread and bananas and applesauce and eats a little bit that evening.

He's never been out of cryo so long before, and he wonders if tomorrow when he wakes up he'll remember how he knows what food to buy for invalids with sensitive stomachs.

5

He doesn't.

6

He sleeps in thirty-minute shifts in a bathtub in a master bathroom of a condemned two-story house in Pennsylvania and he remembers

remembers?

remembers

_Zola who wiped his glasses on the sleeve of his lab coat saying_

_James Buchanan Barnes is dead_

_There is no such person; you are_

_I have made the perfect weapon, gentlemen_

_Pierce tucks his fingers on either side of the Soldier's jaw and shakes his head so a cold wet lock of it slaps his eye (he's not been given permission to shut them and Pierce says to look him in the eye, soldier)_

_Your name is James Buchanan Barnes_

_the end of the line the end of the line the end of the line the end of the line the key under a rock, Steve, you idiot_

_not like there's anything to steal, 'cept your hair pomade_

_Barnes curls up in the bathtub, and his left boot leaves a dark smudge on the porcelain. He is cold and he shivers, and he thinks he used to use a blanket but he doesn't have one now._

_When he lies still and waits to sleep again, he can smell that his hair stinks_

_and the men in the cage stink too, four days after capture after a week in the forest, but he combs his hair back with his fingers as best he can_

_Going to charm your way out of here, Yank?_

_he pissed in his pants, strapped down to the table and one of the men in the lab coats laughed but Zola did not, Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes 32557038_

_we're going to win and they'll hang you, Zola_

_but that will be far too late to help you, Sergeant, now try to hold still_

Tomorrow, he thinks, tomorrow he will bathe and wash his hair.

7

He wakes up in a field outside Saranac Lake, NY and does not remember how he got there. There is no blood on him, but he feels raw and overstretched and _wrong_.

7.1

The bag with the laptop he took lies several feet away from him. He slings it over his shoulder and starts walking.

7.14

He's not sure, but he thinks it's possible he's never been out in the country without the express purpose of killing somebody.

So there's one thing Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes and the Winter Soldier had in common.

7.16

Rumlow and the others didn't much like open spaces, he remembers (a mission in Paraguay where he murdered a man who was taking a bath with a prostitute). They always twitched uncomfortably and complained about exposure, but the Soldier didn't care one way or another. Wasn't ever him being hunted. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, he thinks (or remembers?) disliked the open country because it wasn't Brooklyn, where everyone lived two feet from each other and the alleyways weren't wide enough to sit in.

But Barnes-of now, of wherever whenever whomever this is-he thinks sun on his skin and grass underfoot is-

it is-

he likes it.

7.17

It occurs to Barnes that he hasn't consciously decided he likes something in over seventy years.

The thought makes him angry? No, not angry; cheated, maybe, of something he's not entirely certain he could name but that should have been his nonetheless-should have been Sergeant Barnes'-and Barnes finds himself hoping the rest of the time until the HYDRA cells regroup passes quickly.

The fingers of his metal hand flex the way the Soldier's used to on a mission, but

7.171

he is not the Soldier anymore.

7.5

Eventually, he decides to try flagging down a motorist and hitching a ride to New York, because that is definitely not something the Winter Soldier would have done, and he wonders if he is capable of talking to people now, and if he's not he thinks that maybe he should be.

He manages 'Yeah', 'Barnes', and 'Brooklyn' without too much trouble, and the young man in the driver's seat

i"I have a younger brother your age," Falsworth says. He nods at the back of the truck, where Steve's out cold but, thank God, recovering. "I know how it is."/i

(who, now that Barnes thinks about it, probably has several years on him, biologically) doesn't really wait for answers to any of the questions he asks; he talks on and on about green energy (d'you hear about Stark's newest-), his girlfriend (rack the size of Texas), and his dissertation (Defenestration of Prague. No, really), which is apparently ikilling/i him, seriously killing him, man-

-and Barnes lasts about eleven minutes before he knocks open the passenger door and tumbles out of the still-moving vehicle.

The young man waves at him and yells, but Barnes jogs away and disappears behind a tree.

Maybe he can hold off on the socializing for now.

10

Yesterday he tried to visit the street where Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes grew up to see if-

to see if-

Yesterday he tried to visit the street where Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes grew up, but halfway down the street he spotted Captain Rogers perched on the pavement in front of the plaque that marks their old apartment building, comfortably and innocuously attired in jeans and a leather jacket, a venti Starbucks cup in front of him, a sketchbook on his lap and a cell phone in his hand, looking like he was willing to wait there all day long if that's what he had to do, like he just expected Barnes to waltz up to him and sit down for a chit chat.

Which is of course ridiculous, but is also, from what bits and pieces Barnes can remember, something that Captain Rogers would absolutely do.

Barnes ducked behind a hot dog vendor's cart and sneaked away when Rogers took a phone call Barnes' hyper-sensitive hearing identified as Wilson (collateral target. wings. easiest to shoot out the sky if necessary where Target 1 can't interfere).

He's pretty sure Rogers didn't see him, but he steers clear of Brooklyn for the rest of the week all the same.

He swings by a safehouse where he thinks that HYDRA (Pierce. Zola. Rumlow. Someone) took him for rebooting once. There's no one there, of course, but Barnes gets some information left on a computer. He doesn't go over all of it right then, but it seems mostly like notes on cryogenic freezing and the mind wipe they performed on him (on him? On the Soldier) there. He stores it on a thumb drive and saves it for later. Might be useful in figuring out how his memory will work now that there's no more mind wipes (no more chair no more rebooting no more punishment when he makes a mistake and starts to think he's not a tool he's

iSergeant James Buchanan Barnes, 32557038. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, 32557038. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, 32557038.

Try to hold still, Zola says, and then there's

pain  
/i

i"Thought you were saving to take Julia to the dance," Steve says, holding the leather sketchbook like it's made of solid gold. His hand practically caresses its cover-until he doubles over with a deep, wet cough that sends a spike of terror straight through Bucky's spine. The sketchbook drops over the side of the bed, but Steve's having a hard enough time breathing through the cough to notice.

There's water in a pitcher and an empty glass ready on the nightstand, and his hand's on Steve's back as soon as the kid doubles over, but Steve can't sit up or stop coughing long enough to take a sip, and-is that blood on the sheets?

Bucky's feet kick the sketchbook under the bed when he scrambles onto it to sit behind Steve and prop him up against his chest.

"Come on, buddy," he says, and the prayer that bubbles up in his chest isn't so much coherent thought as it is a litany of please god not him not here not yet not now not him

but finally, finally after several minutes Steve's coughing lessens, then stops, and his head lolls back against Bucky's shoulder as he gasps and sucks in lungfuls.

"Sorry," he says eventually, and Bucky has to bend in close to hear it. "'Bout the notebook. Know you-"

He pauses, coughs, and takes a sip from the glass Bucky holds up to his mouth. Bucky wipes the corner of his lips clean with a handkerchief when he's done.

"Know you wanted-Julia, she's nice, you shouldn't-"

The idiot doesn't shut up until Bucky tells him Julia didn't want to go.

Not like Steve can ever tell when he's lying, and he has more important things to do than dance."/i

11-17

When he's just woken up he's all right, but the longer he's awake the more jumbled and confused he feels, and he only needs three hours of sleep a night to function capably.

By the time he bunks down (and it's funny [but, Christ, so fucking frustrating] because he knows for sure that no one's used that phrase around him since 1944, but he doesn't know how he knows that since he doesn't remember massive chunks of what the Soldier was conscious for since then, so how could he know that?)

i(One time in Italy a brunette invited him into a bombed-out schoolhouse, and they lay together on a green divan in what had been a classroom. He'd used the last of his condoms to cover his rifle's muzzle when they crossed that swamp-Dum Dum and his jokes be damned-so he ate her out instead, and made her come four times, and she returned the favor (though he joked that shooting for four would be a bit much, even for him). Afterwards, she drew her fingers through his hair and told him what the city used to be like until Morita called out to them from outside (Oh, Sergeant, Cap needs a hand himself).

He gave the woman a pack of cigarettes. Two days later Steve found one of her very lacy garters in Bucky's jacket pocket and blushed so red the fellows teased him for days)./i

By the time he bunks down most nights now

_One time Steve dives in front of Dernier during an ambush and gets three shots in the gut for his trouble. He's unconscious by the time they're rid of the ambushing party, and it takes two of them to carry him out. Dugan and Falsworth do the honors_

_(and it kills Bucky not to grab a hold of Steve, but he knows he's the best shot and he'll do the most good covering their retreat)_

_and Gabe frets over Steve and tries to keep him breathing until they reach safety._

_Steve's sweating and moaning underneath Bucky's jacket, and he's losing so much blood that Bucky wonders if even supersoldiers can survive that much, and he watches their backs and their fronts and both of their sides and even so finds his lips curling in the prayers he chanted years ago when Steve was still a skinny punk who couldn't make it through a winter without taking to his bed with something awful that scared Bucky and his mother half to death._

_He prays four hours straight until they make up camp and Steve lapses into sleep._

By the time time he bunks down most nights now, his brain feels like someone's stuck a fork inside his skull and

ripped

everything inside apart like a chunk of rotten pork.

His head aches, too, so much so that one time when he tracks down a set of coordinates to several HYDRA safehouses he has to pause in the middle of memorizing them to vomit because focusing his eyes on the scrap of paper in his hand hurts enough to nauseate him.

He wonders if it's just his memory coming back, or if it's his brain adjusting to this brave new world, or if this is something caused by everything they did to Sergeant Barnes's and the Soldier's body before and it is never going to go away.

He wonders, sometimes, if Zola even knew what he was doing (no) or if it was all just guesswork and sheer dumb luck the Soldier turned out as functional as he did.

He's pretty sure that's one thing that he'll never know.

19

He stops by England on his way to Austria and breaks into a psychologist's office there. Barnes has no interest in the woman, but she works exclusively with veterans, so he climbs in through her office window at four in the morning and downloads her hard drive to his laptop. He stuffs a couple of books from her shelves into his pack while he's at it for good measure, dense little bricks about flashbacks and PTSD. They sit in his rucksack for weeks, along with his laptop, but sometimes of an evening he'll flip through the books and underline passages with a ballpoint pen he stole from a gift shop at the airport. He reads through Dr. Patel's notes, too, of all the exercises she's giving her soldiers to help them work through nightmares and panic attacks, and it doesn't really apply to him at all, but short of something else to do he decides to try some once the next few weeks are over and he's gotten what answers he can from whatever's left of HYDRA.

He stays in London for a couple of days, but one time when he's ducking into a pub for supper (because acclimating oneself to people in social situations was something Dr. Patel was big on, and it couldn't hurt) Barnes sees Sam Wilson stride out of a GAP down the street with a cell phone to his ear.

Barnes leaves London that same evening.

24

The first safe house is in Stockholm, which Barnes thinks should be funny but isn't sure why, and he decides to get there early and stake out the place in case it's a trap.

26

It's not, but the old laboratory at the edge of the city is.

There were always medics for the Winter Soldier. Barnes remembers Sergeant Bucky used to deal with wounds once in a while when there wasn't anyone to help him with them, but seventy years is a long time, and Barnes just doesn't remember what to do beyond 'tie a bandage around it to stop the bleeding until you finish the mission'.

The cut on his arm stops bleeding soon enough, but the bullet that went through his side caused quite a bit more damage, and he knows enough to clean it out with alcohol but is at a loss for anything further.

It hurts.

27

His head doesn't just hurt, it burns, and his mouth is dry and he can't keep any water down. He takes a pillow with him to the bathtub of his hotel room (looks cleaner than the bed anyway) and dozes off uneasily with a pilfered Glock within easy reach.

29

His side is better, now, but he's so hungry he sways on his feet when he tries to walk. He smashes a vending machine with his metal arm and takes all the snacks back to his room with him.

He switches on the television while he eats. He's seen a bit of television once or twice (once during a mission while watching a target he garroted, a couple of times since DC catching snatches while he bought lunch at a cheap restaurant), but he's never really watched a full-length show since his days of visiting movie theaters with Steve (they sat at the back and sometimes shared a bag of popcorn and nudged each other when a pretty dame popped up onscreen).

He doesn't understand Swedish, but the program's not too difficult to follow. It's about a group of cooking students who seem to be competing for some sort of prize; they cook a lot of complicated dishes, run around the kitchen in terror, and get yelled at a lot by a chef who doesn't wear a hat but likes to wave his hands a lot to emphasize his swearing.

It reminds Barnes of the parts of basic training he remembers, minus the bullets.

30

Barnes might not be the Winter Soldier anymore, but the Soldier's still a part of him, and that means he retains the information Alexander Pierce and HYDRA needed him to know if a mission went sour.

This includes, by the by, up-to-date information on assassins and gun runners all over the world. Barnes can take out a dozen mercenaries with his bare hands if he has to, but proper weapons make things go considerably more smoothly, and tomorrow's the first of many missions he has planned.

He leaves his hotel room at four in the morning empty-handed and returns eight hours later with a car whose trunk is full of guns, grenades, and body armor.

The gun-runner's house is on the news that evening, as a suspected case of arson which will no doubt baffle local authorities when they dig through the rubble and find the rocket launcher.

Barnes spends the evening cleaning the weapons and making sure everything is ship-shape. He actually has trouble falling asleep and doesn't know why until he realizes he's excited and tense with anticipation. The Soldier never felt anything about a mission, save for irritation when it took longer than expected, but Barnes' flesh fingers tap a tattoo on his thigh when he lies down in his bathtub, and he tosses and turns for an hour before he drifts off.

31

Three men and a woman enter the two-story house the next morning. Barnes watches from the living room in the house across the street and follows when he's certain no one else is coming.

The HYDRA agents are in the kitchen, eating sandwiches and cantaloupe and talking in hushed voices, like someone's going to walk in on them and eavesdrop.

They're only half right.

Barnes walks right up to the edge of the kitchen, hiding behind the half-wall that separates it from the dining area, and slips on a gas mask. Then he takes a small metal disc from his left front pocket, sets it on the floor beside him, and kicks it into the kitchen.

One of the agents-a tall, heavily muscled man, two-fifty easy-actually gets a shot off at Barnes' general area before he falls unconscious.

Barnes waits a couple extra minutes just to be sure before he stands up and drags the four of them to the basement.

He picks one of the smaller men to go first. He immobilizes the other three with flex ties and lays them out in a row in full view of the other man, whom he duct-tapes to a chair and injects with some adrenaline.

The man comes to slow and groggy, but his eyes widen when he sees Barnes, and his muscles seize.

"You know who I am," Barnes says. "So you know what I'm willing to do to get answers."

The man nods so quick it looks like he's shaking.

"Anything," he says.

Barnes smiles.

31.7

The Winter Soldier once was given an assignment to extract some information from a group of SHIELD agents whom Alexander Pierce suspected of discovering HYDRA. The Soldier ambushed the agents on a mission and kidnapped them while planting evidence that suggested they were working with the Russians. He took them to a safehouse where they were interrogated, and when their bodies were of no further use, the Soldier put his hands on either side of each agent's head and snapped their necks.

Bucky once had to interrogate someone as well: he roughed the man up a bit with his fists and threatened to shoot him, and the man gave up everything he knew. When the man-German soldier, just a kid, couldn't even grow a proper mustache yet so he had a lip full of peach fuzz-finished, Bucky got Steve to put on his most earnest, all-American-and-apple-pie face, and together they persuaded the kid to switch sides in the middle of a war in under three hours. Bucky hadn't been averse to taking lives in battle or in ambush, but something about killing a kid like that sat wrong in his gut.

Barnes isn't Bucky, but he's not the Winter Soldier either.

The four agents lay, zip-tied, in the safehouse until morning (long enough for Barnes to get out of Sweden), when the concierge at a small hotel in Zurich is given an envelope by a courier and instructed to pass it on to the tall, blond American who comes down for breakfast at six every morning.

The envelope contains a slip of paper bearing several sets of coordinates and a thumb drive with all the information Barnes has gathered about cryogenics and the memory wipe process. Taped to the thumb drive is a post-it note with the words 'You might want to get Stark on this' in a messy scrawl whose Gs curl to the left the same way they did in Sister Mary Clarence's classroom in 1924.

By the time Captain Rogers has the agents in hand, Barnes is halfway to Moscow, where the agent said they kept the Soldier for the first ten years.

Barnes feels like he did a not wrong thing, and he tells the flight attendant his name is James, and that feels all right too.

57

Six safe houses destroyed. Four laboratories leveled. Twenty-two agents (and eight people in lab coats whom James supposes might once have qualified as scientists) taken into custody, care of Captain Rogers. Two dead, killed by James in self defense (and he's pretty certain not even Bucky Barnes himself would lose any sleep over them).

And all he's learned about his brain is that "Most of your memories should come back, in time."

Some days it's enough. This morning he had a five-minute conversation with a barista and even flirted with her (though he's not sure that's so much his thing; it was more to see if he still could than anything).

Other days, other hours, other seconds sometimes when he suddenly remembers all over again, his brain like a sieve made of pitchforks frustrates him so much he can't even think straight

(like he could to begin with, after they were done with him)

and then there are days when one moment he's walking in 2014 and he smells something or sees something or hears something

and he's

gone

ten and twenty and seventy years at a time

and sometimes he doesn't find himself again for days

and sometimes he _wakes_

somewhere he's never been before

Here is Bucky

And here are the Howlies

And here is the Winter Soldier

And over there is James

And he can't find himself in any of it

And his head aches and his heart hurts and he doesn't know he doesn't know he remembers he remembers

(he remembers not everything not enough but very much a lot too much [he remembers a lot of the war and a lot of the cold and a lot of Bucky and Steve

and he now can understand why Steve threw down the shield

_to the end of the line, buddy_ though Steve is so dramatic sometimes

_was_ so dramatic sometimes. Falsworth agreed with him on this])

But today is a good day; today will be a good day whether it likes it or not.

It's just that James has to wait for his head to stop spinning before he gets out of bed.

Any minute now his brains will settle and he'll climb out of bed.

63

Thinking about it, this is probably the sort of thing Dr. Patel meant by 'trauma'.

64

Yesterday he took a nap and woke up in 1943. Today his landlady walked in on him curled up with a blanket in front of his bed.

He thought she was Morita and told him to watch out for the landmine.

He hasn't seen her since. Better not go out to check in case-

in case-

Better not go out.

73

"You know," says a very loud (clear, bright), familiar voice. "It's not nice to worry your landlady like that. Your ma would whack you with her rolling pin if she knew."

James opens his eyes and Steve Rogers is sitting on the edge of his bathtub.

"Jesus, Rogers," he mumbles. "Seventy years on ice and you're more obnoxious than ever."

He can practically _feel_ Steve's smile beam at him even though he covers his face with his blanket.

"It's-"

And _of course_ the idiot's voice cracks.

"It's good to see you, Bu-buddy."

There's a muffled crash from the bedroom. "Wilson?"

"He can leave if you want."

James shrugs, and he'd leave it at that but it's _Steve_ (and he remembers), so he pulls the blanket down to the bottom of his nose.

"'S fine," he says.

Steve's hunkered down on the edge of the tub like it'll break beneath him, and his fingers are practically twitching from the urge to touch and poke and prod and make sure James is there and fine, but his eyes are big and wide and he doesn't have those lines at the corners of his eyes that mean he's faking his smile.

Aw, hell.

"I don't know if-it's not-I'm not fine," James says.

Steve shrugs.

"I'd be more worried if you were, Buck," he answers. "We take all the time you need, but-let us help?"

James sits up in the tub a bit and wraps the blanket round his shoulders. The fingers of his right hand rub the porcelain. His left hand he curls in his lap and covers with the edge of his blanket.

Steve's still waiting expectantly. James can hear that Wilson's sat down in the bedroom and is leafing through a book.

"I'm not," he mutters, and he can't meet Steve's eyes, "The same guy I used to be."

Steve Rogers huffs a laugh.

"You weren't the same guy after you joined the War, and neither was I, but it didn't stop us then. And I'm not the same guy I was when I went in the ice." This time he _does_ reach out and lay his hand on James' shoulder.

His metal shoulder.

"Won't stop me now."

Steve stands up, and he reaches out his hand.

"Let's go home," he says.

1

And Bucky takes his hand and steps out of the tub.


End file.
